User:Wwf/Time
Dungeon Crawl is a turn-based game. Every action your character takes progresses the turn counter forward by one, and the game is paused between each of your actions. However, new players quickly observe that character and monster behavior can't simply be measured in turns. Turns often take different lengths of time to complete. Even the concept of time used in the in game descriptions and character logs have three different meanings.
- Wall Clock Time
- For real life, the clock on the wall measures time. For the player character in crawl this does not have any influence on the game. Wall clock time only shows up in the morgue file as the date you started the game and the date that you died.
- Play Time
- This is the time that you the player have been actively playing the game. If you do not do anything for a while (about 30s), the game idles and the play time stops accumulating. You can see the this time by typing "E" or "%". The play time are also available in the character dumps and the morgue files. It is formatted like hh:mm:ss.
- Turn Completion Time
- This is the time your character has spent in the game as a result of taking actions. It includes delays from moving, fighting, throwing, and casting spells. Looking up information does not take any time. This is measured in aut (arbitrary units of time). The game displays time in deca-auts (10auts = 1 deca-aut). As such, an aut of time is displayed as 0.1. It is always displayed as a number with one digit to the right of the decimal point.
- Turn Count
- This increments every time you take an action. Some actions increment the turn count by more than one. For example auto-exploring, wearing armour, or being paralyzed. This is always displayed as an integer.
- Delay
- This is a time measured in auts and is always an integer.
- Speed
- Speed is usually quantified as very slow, slow, normal, fast, or very fast. When a number is given it usually refers to a delay of 100/speed auts. See the section on what is speed.
What is Speed
It is easier to think about actions being slow or fast rather than having a long or short delay. So when the game or this wiki describes actions they tend to use the term speed over the term delay. However, when the game makes calculations about speed it eventually converts speed to delay time.
So what does a speed of xx mean? The math is delay = 100 / speed, but this does not really convey much information. Think of a speed=10 corresponds to a delay=10. A speed of 12 is 20% faster than a speed of 10. In terms of delay that is a delay of 1/1.2 or 8.333 auts. Bats are ridiculously fast and have a speed of 30. So they are three times faster than a human and have a calculated delay of 3.333...
| Speed | Delay | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 16.66.. | worm |
| 7.141... | 14 | untrained long sword |
| 7.8125 | 14-2.4/2 = 12.8 | starting minotaur fighter using long sword with skill 2.4 |
| 10 | 10 | human, rat, frilled lizard, dagger without training |
| 12 | 8.333.. | ball python, Giant cockroach |
| 13 | 7.692.. | adder on land |
| 13 (swim: 60%) = 21.666.. | 4.615.. | adder swimming |
| 10 +50% = 15 | 6.666.. | dagger with speed brand without training |
| 30 | 3.333.. | bat |
Fractional Delays
The game clock marches on one aut at a time. There are no actions that take a fractional time of an aut. All time is in integer auts.
The simple thing to do is to just round a factional delay every time it is encountered. However this can give you a "jump" in advantage since attacking monsters at 8 auts will be noticeably slower than attacking monsters at 7 auts. The developers have dealt with this by adding an extra aut to a delay at random. The average delay will match the desired fractional delay in the long run.
For example, if you start as a minotaur fighter with a long sword you will start with a long sword weapon skill of 2.4. A long sword has a base delay of 14 aut. It's delay is reduced by the long sword weapon skill by 2.4/2 auts until it reaches 7 auts. So you start out with a weapon delay of 14-2.4/2=12.8 auts. Assuming there are no other delay penalties the following will occur:
- 80% of the time your attack delay will be 13 auts.
- 20% of the time your attack delay will be 12 auts.
Your average attack delay will be 12.8 auts, but your actual attack delay will be 12 or 13 auts. The randomness averages out in the long term and it is hard to exploit the differences in attack speed for each attack since the delay will not be predictable. This is normally seen as a good thing that enhances game play by preventing "exploiting the game mechanics".
